Colombia's Sicarios

"Death became a routine, first for the state and society at large,
and then for the groups of adolescents who grew up in the corssfire
and amidst the indifference to corpses on the streets. The young
sicarios were born of the absence of any binding principles which might
have given then some respect for one another and for life itself. They
were the result of the absence of moral and cultural prototypes, and
of the multiple influences of new social actors who made brute force
and the love of luxury the pillars of social relations. The juvenile
gangs were the result not only of a socioeconomic crisis, but of a
crisis of legitimacy of social institutions."

For those who have been following the 1994 World Cup, the
news the Colombian player who scored against his own team during
the game against the Americans had been shot and killed came as
a complete shock. People wondered how such a senseless act of
violence could take place, but that was it. Almost no one bothered
to look further back into the recent history of Colombia in
order to find an answer of how defenseman Escobar (no relation to
well-known Pablo) culd lose his life for the "horrible sin" of
scoring against his own team.
After the news of Escobar's assassination hit the airwaves,
people around the world were quick to point the finger to the
drug-lords and to Colombia's culture of violence as the main
culprits in Andres Escobar's death. However, almost no one
paid any attention to those who actually pulled the trigger:
Medellin's young sicarios. It is expected that with time,
people (including those historians interested in Colombian
history) will begin to attempt wider explanations of the
self-goal that cost Andres Escobar, a promising young star
of Colombia's national soccer team, his life. It is in this
context that the article "Colombia's Sicarios", published in
the May/June issue of NACLA Report on the Americas represents
a valuable source of information.
In addition to its testimonial account of the reasons
that one of Medellin's many poverty-stricken youths had to
become a "sicario" (as a paid assassin for the drug-cartels
is commonly known), "Colombia's Sicarios" offers a good
and extensive analysis (from a socio-historical perspective) of
the culture of drugs and violence that engulfed Colombia in
the early 1970s and 1980s.
Very carefully, and step by step, the author/s of this
article offer a glimpse of life and death in the shatytowns and
belts of poverty that appeared in various Colombian urban centers
as a result of a number of social, political, and economic
developments during the last three decades. Most important,
it offers a historical analysis of how the drug-lords (with
the indirect-or direct-help of the state's, police, and/or
military institutions' misguided policies) were able to lure
hopeless young kids into their ranks. As the drug trade and
the violence began to overcome the state's ability to control
them, the establishment's repressive apparatus increased its
arsenal with the goal of crushing these social threats. The
result: increased violence, camouflaged counter-insurgency,
death squads, and social cleansing. It is its discussion of
these topics, and of Chucho's life and reasons to become a
"sicario", that the article "Colombia's Sicarios" becomes
an excellent source for historians and other academics interested
not just in Colombia, but also in social and modern Latin American
history. Had "Colombia's Sicarios" been written two months later,
it would have (without any doubt) have contained an analysis of
Andres Escobar's death at the hands of Medellin's infamous sicarios.